My Tortured Inheritance

A Call To Action
The New York Times
December 13, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

By RAFAEL GUMUCIO

Santiago, Chile — JUST after an official report on torture during Gen. Augusto Pinochet's regime was issued last week, I sat down to write a cool, rational article about it. I was all set to write about the crocodile tears of the guilty parties, and about the newspaper that had the gall to criticize the high cost of reparations that President Ricardo Lagos announced - 27,255 people will get lifetime pensions of about $200 a month - as a way of covering up its own guilt and shame.

As I was gathering my thoughts, the phone rang. It was my mother. In a voice that sounded proud yet slightly uneasy, she told me that she and one of her brothers had been mentioned in the report. She seemed both embarrassed and honored to have been recognized as part of a national wound, as part of that red stripe of blood that occupies half the Chilean flag: embarrassed because she has always felt guilty for surviving a vile dictatorship that killed so many of her friends and acquaintances, yet honored to be part of a political transition that is finally coming full circle. After 15 years of uncomfortable, incomplete democracy, at last Chile has found the courage to examine and judge the past without lies or revisions.

From 1973 through 1989, the report concluded, torture was a policy of the state. It took many forms, both physical and psychological. When my mother was detained in 1973, she was 32 years old. She was the director of the school for social work at Catholic University, an institution the military regarded as a nest of leftist subversives. She was a member of the Socialist Party, a vocal advocate of Salvador Allende, and the wife of a university professor who supported the same causes. We learned in the report that the owner of the bakery on our street reported my mother to the authorities as a "dangerous subversive."

Naval officers and civilians from the right-wing Homeland and Liberty brigade surprised her at home one afternoon. They dragged her away in front of her children, blindfolded her and carried her to an uncertain fate, only to release her a few days later. The naval officer who let her go, however, was kind enough to warn her that she and her family would be well advised to leave the country, because if she were arrested again, she might not be released so quickly, if at all. A week later, my parents, my grandparents, my brother and I sat in the French Embassy waiting for asylum. The following week we were in France, where we remained for 11 years before returning to Chile.

Unlike other Chileans, my mother was not subjected to an electric cattle prod; she was neither beaten nor raped. For more than two decades, my mother felt that she did not have the right to demand any kind of justice because, in the end, her suffering hadn't been all that terrible. She even thought that maybe she had deserved it when they arrested her, blindfolded her, and forced her to listen as they tortured her students and co-workers.

Torture is an act that stems not from savagery but from extreme cultural and scientific sophistication. It makes the survivors feel that they are among the privileged, traitors to the cause. It kills people's spirits but keeps their bodies alive, transforming all those who escape it into zombies in the service of another despicable torturer: fear. It is a gruesomely effective tool, for it knows just how to manipulate imagination and paralyze instincts for rebellion or resistance.

I saw my mother's arrest. I was 3 years old. Based on what my family tells me, the best I could think to do was to fall down on the ground and pretend I was dead so they wouldn't take me away, too. At that moment, I suppose I did the same thing as the rest of the country: I invented a kind of unconsciousness, I pretended I wasn't there. I rushed into death and I saved myself, but I never fully came back to life.

I was not tortured, and my mother suffered only some illegal harassment, but something died inside both of us that spring afternoon: the belief that our neighbors wouldn't report us to the authorities, the belief that freedom is not just a right but an instinct as basic as breathing.

This is what the Chilean state and its agents, perfectly aware of their actions, did to my family and more than 27,000 others. And it worked. The majority of those who were subjected to extreme torture ended up denouncing other militants and renouncing politics altogether. Whether or not left-wing mythmakers choose to admit it, the torturers succeeded in stripping people of their dignity - not only that of the people who suffered electric shocks and other diabolical torture methods, but of their children, their husbands, their wives and their loved ones who, like me, pretended to be dead in order to survive.

I don't know if $70 million a year, the estimated cost of the reparations, is a lot or a little money to make up for this damage. All I know is that the torture report, in all its graphic reality, is a way of telling us - those of us who played dead in 1973 and who died slow deaths in the years that followed - that we are still alive, and that we have a right to continue living.

Rafael Gumucio is a columnist for Las Ultimas Noticias. This article was translatedby Kristina Cordero from the Spanish.

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